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Comment by protonimitate | Hacker News Reader

There's something awesome (in the literal sense) and unsettling about watching something and being able to say "I am witnessing history".

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When I saw the first successful booster landing I realized I was seeing history.

When I saw the first successful booster landing on a drone ship I realized I was again watching history.

And there's still more!

Live Webcam from Spaceman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBr2kKAHN6M

All of this insane expense and amazing science and they couldn't make a VR360 camera happen. :(

Tough crowd. I'm rather more amazed at what did happen than at what did not.

I guess "amazing science" wasn't strong enough for you. If we were able to look around 360 from the POV of the driver, rather than getting the two feeds, it would be better. It doesn't cost a lot to put a lens on the camera you have, provided it was high enough resolution. Even a 1080 can do 360, but 4-8k is better.

I'm not sure what happened that was new here other than the PR of putting a car into solar orbit. They landed their 20 something rocket vertically. They crashed another one or something.

It just seems like a lot of expense and science to stop at a normal camera.

Amazing. Do you honestly believe that what you've just witnessed is prioritized in terms of the quality of the video feed rather than everything else that just happened?

Do you even begin to appreciate the challenges in getting a 4-8k feed from space to earth?

I've been in the video business from '95 to 2015 and there is so much going on behind the scenes from even a simple live stream from a spacecraft to earth that I am wondering what it would have taken for you to be satisfied. FWIW I've personally done the Internet portion of two Space shuttle launches live-stream to earth and I can tell you that nothing about such an event is 'simple' by any stretch of the imagination. 2.5 million people watched that stream and it 'just worked'.

This never was about the quality of the feed (which is nothing short of amazing by the way), but about testing a new rocket. The fact that only one of the three first stages didn't make it is also quite impressive.

Yes, it was PR. But given the amount of work that went into this I figure they were entitled a bit of leeway.

This comment is totally out of place on a site like this, and it makes me wonder (1) what incredible stuff you've been up to today and (2) whether or not you are even remotely aware of any of the complexity a feat like today's launch entails to put you in a position to criticize any of this rather than to accept it in gratitude and wonder.

Keep in mind that according to Elon Musk there was a 50% chance the whole thing blew up on the pad I'd say they got their priorities right and spent what time and budget they had on the main item rather than on the PR bit.

To go with this - Apple has struggled to get live footage to work from the middle of the tech world, with good infrastructure and a with a massive budget. It would seem harder to get space tv working.

I’m guessing it’s bandwidth and tech limitations. They don’t have a very fat pipe up there, and they also have tons of experience with the type of camera they have mounted in there... maybe they didn’t have time to test and certify any modern 360 cameras. Hopefully it’ll happen sometime though!

I think bandwidth isn't the issue. You can do 360 with a 4k feed. I expect it was more of a issue of hardware that would make it past Mars without space killing it.

You do realize this guy basically did the bottle flip with two fucking rockets in unison?

Then again he calculated it, which is more than we can say for the countless teenagers trying to flip bottles in on their tables for views.

@$#%^%# light pollution everywhere. turn down those %$%@%# lights so we can see the ^#@&^^% stars.

(...yes I do know it is the ol Sol)

Did anyone else notice that the bottom two windows are not different cameras on different boosters? The guy even told us, "I know they look similar but they're different". Nope, they are the same. Watch how you can see two pads and they both land on the pad on the right. And you can see the second booster burning in the same orientation. The roads leading to the pads also make it easy to notice.

For this launch the live stream editors probably had 4x the normal amount of feeds to switch, so I’ll forgive them for a couple editing mishaps. I’m guessing they don’t have the same setup as would be at something like the Super Bowl... at least not yet :)

They also failed to show the fairing separation view when the music started and repeated that shot after the stream was essentially over. I guess a lot of things were just new and not quite like normal F9 launches (where presentation has been largely flawless for a while now).

I think the cameras were just on opposite sides so the different pads looked to be on the same side, no?

Nah, the two feeds were identical including a portion of the other booster’s rocket plume in the top left. The two pads are different colours, both feeds showed the rocket landing on the lighter pad.

Hopefully we will get a corrected version for the official movie!

It seems they fixed it. Here is the corrected version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCc16uozHVE

The live (uncorrected) version for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wxV-lUsZg

Sadly, they seem to have taken down the corrected version. :(

Or the part where he was about to spill the beans about the center core, but was quickly told to STFU in his earbud so they could delay the news of any failure until after the primary news cycle burned through the tandem landing miracle fuel.

I hope one day to be as good at both engineering and PR as SpaceX is.

They corrected this in a new upload: https://youtu.be/bCc16uozHVE?t=29m36s

They are slightly different, I suspect it's for creating 3d illusion. If you cross your eyes and overlap the two images you will see the landing in 3d.

It's not quite our generation's "one small step for Man" moment (I'm saving that for when we actually land a human on Mars) but it's damn close.

I hope it's not close to our generational moonshot. We've had quite a few impressive launchers in the past - not commercial, of course, but also built without current level of accumulated experience - so to consider FH their modern version would be to accept lowering the standards.

Nevertheless :) FH first launch is an impressive feat.

If they keep going the way they're going, I think our generation's moonshot is going to be a Mars-shot.

If you haven't seen it there is some, according to Armstrong 'persuasive', evidence[0] that he did in fact say 'one small step for a man'.

[0] https://www.space.com/17307-neil-armstrong-one-small-step-qu...

I fell this is the most important moment in space exploration since the Apollo landing, but I don't see a big coverage in mainstream media. Elon is probably on the trajectory to be remembered as the biggest entrepreneur ever.

I don't fanoboi much but Elon gets me pretty close. He's done 5 lifetimes of work before hitting 50.

I would say, "since the ISS". The ISS isn't as exciting as sending humans to another celestial body, but we'll never get to Mars without the lessons learned and it's an amazing feat.

Strictly speaking, every time you watch something you're witnessing history.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

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